Warforged

In the high peaks of the Barrier Mountains, when the gnomes still called it home and lived in peace with the goliaths, a gnome named Emrys discovered an ancient ship. In its echoing halls, he discovered beings made of metal and within them he saw great potential for the future of Andali. A world of iron where no one died before they were ready. He researched these beings, calling them his Dead Iron Gods, until he was able to replicate the Precursor technology. He constructed a grand machine called the Soul Collective, to which he tethered his people. When one of them would die, instead their soul entered the Collective and could be transfered to a warforged body, or the Ironborn as he called them.
The gnomes of the Barrier Mountains fell out of worship of the gods, because who would give worship to divinity when you have created that which they keep away from you? For this heresy, they were chased out of the Barrier Mountains by the goliaths. Many places still see the existance of the warforged as an affront to the gods, or pity the souls trapped within the iron frames, and object to their creation on these grounds. The gnomes fled their homes and migrated through Kyrrix and the Fulminarian Empire with their Ironborn but were not welcomed anywhere until they reached the Red Mountains, where the dwarves there, who had recently suffered the catastrophic razing of their capital city at the hands of the great wyrm Fjell, welcomed them with open arms on the condition they helped rebuild. Central to both empires and constructed atop a major confluence of leylines, the Red Mountains proved the perfect place to create a grand Soul Collective that could reach anywhere across the continent.
But during construction of this grand machine, Emrys was betrayed by his companion, High Artificer Hesse, and the Soul Collective was twisted to become the Soul Compendium, a malicious vessel that processed the soul of any pacted to it and erased the memories of those it reincarnated into a warforged frame. Until the destruction of the Soul Compendium at the hands of the Flamebringers, these memory-less husks are what fueled the war effort of many states.

Warforged

Crafted for war, many warforged are unaware that they are captured reincarnated souls. They are tethered to a localized compendium that commands them, forcing them to carry out the bidding of whomever wields the spherical device. During the War, they were sold to many nations as the expendable soldiers, which flooded the Red Mountains with blood money. In the Peace, the Red Mountains, until recently, slowed warforged production, but continued to sell freshly minted warforged as labor. Several unions have been constructed to question the moreal efficacies of this choice, but no change has been made. With the destruction of the Soul Compendium, production has ceased, but warforged still exist in the wild under the control of their local compendium.
Warforged free of their compendium, whether because they were released or were freed, regain their will and wander the countries of Andali, seeking to find a way to fill the hole within themselves that they can't seem to comprehend the reason for.

Ironborn

When a warforged is created, there is the chance that the soul within was too strong to be wiped by the vicious processing of the Compendium. These are the Ironborn, created as Emrys originally intended. If they escape death at the hands of their creators who hope to return their soul to the Compendium for reprocessing, these Ironborn often live in the confluence beneath the Hollow Mountain and have begun to make their way out of the Red Mountains with the destruction of the Soul Compendium.
Some Ironborn were born warforged who overcame their mnemonic barricade through immense effort. This process takes an intense arcane ritual, crafted by Emrys over centuries in his own Ironborn form, that forces them to relive the manner of their death in order to recall their entire lives before they took on their new form. These Ironborn spend decades trying to balance the person they were before with the person they became when they were a warforged, robbed of the memories of their past life.